How Korea Splits a Music Stream

🎼One song, several owners#

Rights fork into three

A song carries overlapping rights. The person who wrote the words and the melody holds copyright, while the people who turned it into sound and the party that finished the recording hold separate rights. Korean law groups the latter two as neighbouring rights and keeps them apart from copyright. That is where the split accounting begins.

The writer's share#

Rights attached to the song itself

This right belongs to whoever wrote the melody and the lyrics. It travels with the song wherever it goes, so it works on the radio and in a shop just the same. Changing the singer does not change this share. It is also the branch that pays the original writer when a cover appears.

Singers and players#

The performer's share

This right belongs to the people who turned the song into actual sound, from vocalists to instrumentalists. Writing nothing but playing on the session is enough to earn a share. Session musicians whose names appear only in a credit line sit here too. The Federation of Korean Music Performers manages it.

Whoever made the recording#

The producer's share

This right belongs to the party that booked the studio and paid for the master. In practice an agency or a label usually stands here. It is also why re-recording the same song creates a separate track in rights terms. The Recording Industry Association of Korea manages it.

🏛️Societies do the collecting#

How trust management works

Rights holders cannot sign with every service one by one. So they entrust their rights to a society, which collects in its own name and pays its members. Doing this requires a licence from the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism under the Copyright Act. In music, four bodies hold that licence.

The four licensed bodies#

One branch of rights each

When the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism approved the music transmission tariff, it named four societies: the Korea Music Copyright Association, KOSCAP, the Federation of Korean Music Performers and the Recording Industry Association of Korea. The first two cover copyright and the last two cover neighbouring rights. The shape of the rights shows up directly in the list.

The day copyright got a second door#

The 2013 competition decision

Copyright trust management sat with a single body for decades. In December 2013 the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism decided to introduce competition into music copyright trust management and selected a second licensee. That body is today's KOSCAP. Creators gained a choice of where to place their catalogue.

Going without a society#

Direct deals instead of trust

Entrusting rights to a society is not compulsory. Agency brokerage and direct contracts with services are both available under the Copyright Act. The cost is that terms have to be matched service by service and statements have to be checked alone. That work grows quickly as a catalogue grows.

📄The document that sets the ratio#

The music transmission tariff

How much of a platform's revenue reaches rights holders is fixed by a document rather than by bargaining. Societies write the tariff and the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism approves it. The framework in use today came out of an amendment approved in June 2018. Start dates and exemptions sit in that same document.

Streaming at 65 to 35#

Five points toward creators

On 20 June 2018 the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism approved an amendment to the music transmission tariff and said the streaming split moved from 60 for creators and 40 for operators to 65 and 35. Downloads stayed at 70 to 30. Two sales formats therefore run at different ratios inside one tariff.

1 January 2019#

Same service, two rule sets

The amendment took effect on 1 January 2019, timed to give operators room to rebuild their product line-up. Subscribers already listening on automatic payment at that point were left outside it. That is how one service came to run two rule sets depending on when someone signed up.

The bundle discount that went away#

Where the unit price was cut

Before the amendment, bundled download products carried steep discounts. The larger the discount, the smaller the base amount the split is calculated on. The Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism decided to phase that discount out over three years. Raising the ratio and protecting the base were handled together.

📈Charts are a different ledger#

Counting is not paying

A ranking counts usage, not money. Payment follows the tariff and the contracts, while the chart follows its own counting rules. The two numbers often point the same way, yet they never come from the same ledger. Deciding which one you are reading removes most of the confusion.

From Gaon to Circle#

Counting crossed the border

Gaon Chart, the domestic pop chart, was relaunched as Circle Chart on 7 July 2022. The Korea Music Content Association runs it. The relaunch announcement listed data partnerships with YouTube, TikTok, Spotify and Apple Music. A count built on domestic usage began taking in overseas data as well.

Rank and revenue are different axes#

Same song, two calculations

A chart ranks by the period and the items its counting rules define. Payment becomes an amount only after the tariff ratio and the contracts are applied. So working backwards from play counts to earnings usually misses. Lining the two numbers up means aligning the definitions first.

🔍What the player screen hides#

Calculations outside streaming

Looking only at a player makes music seem to exist as streams alone. Records still sell, broadcasters still air songs, shops still play them and stages still host them. Each of those shares travels on a different document and a different contract. Counting a song's income means counting these outside places too.

Physical records take another road#

Selling rather than transmitting

The music transmission tariff is, as its name says, a rule about transmission. What a CD or an LP earns when it sells is set by distribution contracts instead. The same song is calculated differently depending on where and how it was sold.

It also plays on stages and airwaves#

Concerts, broadcast, shops

Songs keep working outside streaming. They are performed in venues, carried by broadcasters and played over shop speakers. Those uses are collected under items separate from transmission. Broadcasting is worth its own look, since licences and funding tangle again there.